Comic Relief founder: Black people on primetime TV as rare as 'unicorns'
The actor and comedian said California and New York states were looking at similar legislation modelled on tax breaks the film industry already enjoys. Photo: Rex
(AFP) - British comic legend Sir Lenny Henry claimed black and brown people are as rare as "unicorns" on primetime television and called on governments to give tax breaks to improve diversity.
Despite decades of activism, "the number of black and brown people working on primetime British television is so low they can t even publish the data," the Comic Relief founder told MIPCOM, the world s top TV industry gathering in Cannes on the French Riviera.
"In fact, they are so rare that (BBC wildlife legend) David Attenborough came across three dodos and a unicorn before he found one," Henry joked, after revealing that broadcasters had refused to give the data to unions because the number was so small.
"Despite all our victories, diversity in TV is in a critical condition," he insisted, and only a system of tax credits which rewarded productions which had minorities in key roles could turn the situation around.
The actor and comedian said California and New York states were looking at similar legislation modelled on tax breaks the film industry already enjoys.
Hideously white
Henry, whose charity has raised more $1.3 billion over the last 30 years to fight poverty, said making the people who "actually make the shows more diverse would be a game changer... If the demographic of the pickers and deciders change, we will see a massive difference automatically."
While he said there had been small strides in diversity on screen, "there is a more desperate need for it behind the camera. Women are not just the same as men in skirts, black people are not just white people with browner skin."
"Imagine a world where you never saw people like yourself or you concerns portrayed on screen," Henry told TV executives.
"But this is what our industry does repeatedly. It tells those of us that are absent that our lives and stories don t matter."
British-born Hollywood star Idris Elba "did not go to the States because he needed training," Henry said, "but because he needed a break."
The actor, who appeared in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", said that when he first made his name in the 1980s "there were no people like me in a 10-mile radius of the BBC -- other than the security guards and the ladies in canteen.
"That bit hasn t changed, and there are a few more black and brown faces around the edges now, reading the news... but not a lot has changed since 2001 when its former director-general Greg Dyke called it hideously white ."
